Fabrice asks What did the Internet REALLY change in the hotel industry? — and although i don’t have the inside stats that he’s looking for (my experience over the last 10 years has been as a supplier, not as a hotelier), i would hazard a guess that the biggest recipients of any benefits would be small independent hotels. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Online hotel booking findings from the ITB World Travel Trends Report
In General on July 2, 2010 at 11:37
ITB is a huge endeavour, with 108,000 trade visitors, and over 10,000 exhibitors from 180 countries at its Berlin show (not including the ITB Asia show), and the participation of so many travel related companies gives it access to an impressive amount of data.
Looking through this, i was excited to see the continued growth in online bookings, especially in a difficult year for travel and tourism. Read the rest of this entry »
Who are booking hotels online, technically speaking?
In General on June 28, 2010 at 19:00
A new post on the Keen website looks at 66,000 bookings from 6 million visitors, making bookings at 45 hotel and resort properties in 8 countries in Asia Pacific, to work out which visitors are the best hotel customers from a technical viewpoint. Key takeaways are the importance of tracking visitors to your site, testing across browsers and operating systems, and why visitors with large screens are so important to you.
Anthony Green – June 2010
Why hotel customers book offline
In General on June 27, 2010 at 18:09Interesting release from PhocusWright, giving some insights into the minds of leisure travellers who prefer to book offline.
The biggest reasons for customers booking offline are personal service (33%), the feeling that they would get a better price booking offline (21%), and a belief that they would get better customer service if something goes wrong (16%).
Despite the US focus of this survey, all these factors will be familiar to ecommerce and revenue teams in Asia. Read the rest of this entry »
Hotel websites are all the same?
In General on June 18, 2010 at 09:54Read an interesting post on Hotel Blogs — Most hotel websites look the same, try to be different — which comments on Seth Godin’s assertion that hotel websites all look the same.
Interesting point. Leaving aside the bigger point that hotels are struggling to innovate in their core product and brand offerings, innovation with travel sites is hard. In the early years of the internet, it could be argued that innovation was high — when the marketing department controlled the sites, and looked for the Wow! factor, often through Flash and lots of graphics. The result was a bit of a mess, and sites that didn’t necessarily generate a lot of revenue. Read the rest of this entry »
Great mobile site from Mandarin Oriental
In General on June 16, 2010 at 08:01Saw this earlier today, a great implementation of a mobile site from Mandarin Oriental. They’ve moved beyond the standard, stripped-down mobile site, to give something that has a lot more branding, with a clean design and great images.
The home screen is simple, focusing on finding a hotel. Read the rest of this entry »
iPads for rent on planes
In General on June 2, 2010 at 09:06
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Jetstar is planning to rent iPads, preloaded with content such as videos, e-books, magazines, games and music on domestic flights at $10 a time.
An interesting idea, which makes me wonder how suitable the approach would be for hotels. Any worries about guests walking off with the iPad could be taken care of with a deposit. For upscale hotels, iPads are already becoming a popular value-added service. For budget properties, iPad rental is both a potential revenue stream, and a more cost effective way to implement an advanced multimedia service (cheaper than adding a system made up of TVs, computers, DVD players, etc).
It will be interesting to see how this will be approached in the 2- and 3-star world.
Anthony Green – June 2010
Hotels offering the latest in technology
In General on May 26, 2010 at 08:19AKA The Best Geek Hotels in the World in 2010, courtesy of Hotel Chatter. My personal favourite is the use of smart phones (iPhone, Blackberry and Android are supported) to replace room keys. A company called Open Ways provides the technology for this.
IHG, who are running the trial, are taking a cautious approach, asking not just if the technology works, but also if it alienates the customer — do customers feel less warmth towards the brand with this kind of change.
More details on that here.
With the competition in the market, particularly at the high end, tech is proving to be a real battleground.
Anthony Green – May 2010
Apple’s Missing Piece
In General on May 25, 2010 at 18:30I’ll admit it — I’m an Apple fan. I own an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, a couple of Mac Minis, an iPod and an iPad. Needless to say, I love them for their user-friendliness, and the way they let me do what I want to do without any serious techsupport.
TV in my house has been replaced by a Mac: using Front Row, the kids choose their TV programs using a cutesy little Apple Remote, so simple even my 2 year old can use it. They don’t know that there’s a server sitting upstairs, storing all the TV programs and movies, and serving them over our wifi. The server’s nothing special, a generic box with FreeNAS (a Linux-like operating system) and a few large hard disks.
The same system means that anyone with a computer in the house can watch movies over the wifi. This works fantastically, even on my iPad (Air Video is a killer app for this, converting files on the fly if they’re the wrong format fort the iPad).
However, there’s a serious gap in the whole puzzle. I can’t share my music from iTunes without iTunes running on another computer. I can’t view my photos on iPhoto without iPhoto running on another computer. My server is always running, but if I want to listen to music or look at photos, I have to run upstairs to switch on the computer that has that program. Either that, or i need to leave the computer with my photo and music libraries running all the time — a waste of electricity, as i have my server already running.
Likewise, I always need to use the same computer to add music and photos — in the Apple world, i can’t add to my main library from a different computer; if I chose to add music or photos to a different computer, syncing media between different computers is a pain that can’t be achieved without hacks.
Clearly, what’s needed is an Apple Home Server — a stylish white or aluminium box that sits somewhere next to your wifi router, with a couple of big hard drives, and a server version of iPhoto and iTunes. Any computer on the network could access the movies on there (through Front Row); music could be accessed from any computer on the network; any computer could be used to add photos, as they share the same library that sits on the server — plug in a camera anywhere, and zap! they’re added to the server.
This device would also handle backups, using Time Machine (which the Time Capsule already does).
Then we’d have a great way for all the Apple products in the house to freely share all content without headaches. Surely this isn’t too much to ask, Steve?
Anthony Green – May 2010
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